The risk is yours! We offer no guarantees, just tips! Hacking Joomla!

No, don't expect how-to's on black-hat hacking into a Joomla site - there we are providing how to modify the Joomla core and addons to get most out of it. This category is intended to be used by the white-hat hackers, Joomla siteowners who want to get out more from the system they have.

It's one of besk keept "secrets" of Joomla 2.5+ - there is a built in password strenght meter, ready to be used. And some are selling for good money - and others offering free plugins - to let you unleash the hidden power.

But if you aren't afraid to make your hands dirty with some PHP code, here is how you can do this:

In an earlier tip (Help! My editor background is colored!) showed the most foolproof way to fix the common problem, when the template CSS settings are causing the WYSIWYG editors to have colored background, making edits hard to perform. Apparently there are couple of situations when the tip does not help - and there are many of you using still the default TinyMCE editor (and not switched already to the best Joomla content editor - JCE).

Joomla is a great piece of software, and the developers are deserved allready full support for keeping it evolving. One of the easy methods are to keep those Powered by Joomla texts and messages in place, and visible. But what if - with good reasons - you want to get rid of those? For example to make less obvious for Joomla-hackers to identify your site as a possible next target - to name only one of possible multiple reasons. (Read also this article about how to remove the Generated by Joomla! tag!) Or you may want to keep it, but a bit tweaked, to reflect better your contribution to that site of yours. The same questions are arising: where that footers are coming from?

The default Joomla "Read More..." link is fine... but as always is room for improvement. Especially SEO wise, but not only. How about to have a more descriptive and compelling "Read more..." link, complete with the article title for example? Ye-ye-ye, you can right now use sh404SEF for all Joomla flavors, but what if you don't have it?

Have you ever seen this error message? Yea, correct it's seen in Media Manager when you try to upload files of certain types, as a MP3 file to use with your brand new MP# player module, or an Excel sheet to share whit your visitors.

Subcategories

Don't do this! We are not recommending doing ANY hacks in Joomla! core! You will compromise both upgradeability of your site - and potentially your security. But sometimes you are facing a situation when you need to do this... and then you can look up for a potential solution here. Use these tips only on your own risk - there are no guarantees!

Template is an essential part of a Joomla site. It's not only simple HTML/CSS/PHP/JS wich let's you show your content, it's a genuine shell with endless of possibilities for success - and failure. There are defined not only how your site will look like for your human visitors, but also for searchengines too. So it's your primary tool in your SEO efforts.

And also it's first line of your defence too. Lots of security holes can be opened with a badly written template! And also, don't forget, that might be the biggest resource hog - so the first place to optimize your site's performance.

More: has a tremendous amount of power built in. You should unleash that, and master it.